Oh, Me-Made-May! Ere your sunshiny shores are betwixt the somethingsomething. I don’t know. Recap!
And a warning to, like, Ian, basically: this is going to be LONG and about pretty dresses and probably boring. Eat me.
Friday, Me-Made-May the 28th:
Saturday, Me-Made-May the 29th:
Okay, this one gets its own whole paragraph. Now, two things, first of all: I wore this in the evening, that same old grey tshirt I’ve worn a hundred times this month during the day. I really want to stress that I really wore something me-made ALL THE TIME this month. I honestly succeeded with that goal much more than I thought I would. Second thing: Ian takes really really terrible photos of me. I don’t know what it is! I guess it’s something about his height and the angle at which the camera sees me when he holds it? But, man, if that’s really the angle that his eyes see me at all the time, that makes me feel kind of sad. So these are actually not the photos he took of me, these are photos I took of myself a month or two ago when I first sewed this dress. So I guess you just don’t get to see the exceptionally cute earrings I wore with it this weekend.
Anyway, the reason this dress gets its own big long entry is mostly google-bait for other future sewers of this pattern. This pattern, Butterick 4790 (the reprint, aka Butterick 6015), aka The Walk-Away Dress (because, according to the pattern notes, you could “start it after breakfast…walk away in it for luncheon!” This is, apparently, the single best-selling patten Butterick has ever made. (According to the this wiki, “Sales of the pattern were so great, that at one point manufacturing of all other patterns ceased, and only the ‘walk-away’ dress was produced until all back-orders for this dress could be filled.”)
It’s still an incredibly popular pattern, and when you google “walk-away dress,” you’ll see that it is also amusingly controversial. Basically, it’s a hard fucking dress to wear. The dress is all one big piece that slips over your head. The front part wraps around and buttons in back, then the back part wraps around and buttons in front. The problem is that the front skirt is straight, and the back skirt is very very full. This makes the back of the dress is much heavier than the front of the dress, which pulls the back down and makes the front inside skirt (blue in my photos) rise up scandalously. There’s a good diagram of the dress (and rant about this problem, though I think the author is both way too hard on herself and a little too hard on the pattern) here. It helps a lot to be very curvy (I suspect 1950s undergarments helped a lot, as well). Still, though – it rides like crazy.
The thing is, though, I kind of LOVE this dress! I WANT it to work! So, for future googlers, here are my plans for the next version I make:
1. I will raise the shoulder seams – the front neck gaps, and the arm holes are too low. This doesn’t have much to do with the riding-up problem, but it’s something that needs to be fixed in addition to it.
2. I will cut the skirt to be a half-circle, not a full circle. This will make it less heavy. Also less costume-ish-ly 1950s, which I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing yet.
3. This seems silly, but why not just sew the front skirt hem to the back skirt hem? You’ll still be able to put it on over your head like you used to, I think. Maybe it would move funny? Like, you would be able to TELL it was sewn together? Then again, my current solution is four safety pins, so I don’t really see the difference.
4. Two other solutions I’ve seen on the internetz are either sewing weights into the hem of the front skirt (which seems hard to wear and also not entirely useful?) or making the front skirt a fully wrapped pencil skirt, so that it actually closes in back. That seems like it would work, but I want to be able to MOVE in a full skirt, not be trapped in a pencil skirt INSIDE a full skirt.
Anyway. I know you’re all on the edge of your seats, so I’ll be sure to keep you updated as I make fixes!
Sunday, Me-Made-May the 30th:
Okay, another horrible photo. But this dress is officially the single best thing I’ve ever made, technically at least. It fits astoundingly well, it looks good on me, there’s buttons and pockets and plackets and shit. I love this dress. It’s made out of a bed sheet I bought at a second-hand store. This dress is nearly perfect. It used to look like this:
And Monday, Me-Made-May the 31st, the final day of Me-Made-May!!
Ah, yes, ending the month on the best possible note: lobster dress. THIS dress is the best thing I’ve ever made, non-technically. This dress, too, was originally a disaster, until I altered it. It used to have a zipper (for some reason? in a knit dress?) and an unbelievably unflattering drop-waist:
I think Ian hates this dress even more than he hates the yellow shirt. So, Ian: this one’s for you, jerk.
Things I’ve learned from Me-Made-May:
1. If you want to wear awesome things, you have to finish them first.
2. You have to wear it. No matter what. Because maybe it doesn’t suck as much as you thought it would.
3. Okay. If it really still does suck, though, you should fix it. Because you probably can.
4. Just because Ian makes an “I kind of hate that” face, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t wear it.
5. Also if he actually says that he kind of hates it out loud, because sometimes he does that, too. He’s kind of a dick.
6. You sew in order to make the crazy shit: the 1950s housewife dresses that get all the compliments, the lobster dresses that get the funny looks, the McQueen knockoffs (oh someday, someday). But it’s nice to be able to sew comfortable, flattering, well-fitted grey t-shirts, too.
7. I have a shitload of clothes.
8. Compliments are awesome, and I totally deserve them, because I am good at sewing and I make awesome stuff. I rock.
9. Nothing, really, ever, frankly, will ever make me blog daily.
10. Ian’s a jerk. Lobster dresses are the best.
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